In this essay, we argue that we have an imperative to dissect how global anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity unfold in academic institutions and how these ideologies emerge in local, precise phenomena, such as the recent National Communication Association's Distinguished Scholars (DS) controversy. We provide descriptions of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity ideologies and explain how meritocracy in academic institutions and the DS controversy are entrenched in both. The study of the ideologies together—in the same way that we, a Mexican man and a Black man, converge as researchers from distinct positionalities—is important because both intersect from similar roots, such as White settlerism, and foment solidarity.

Meritocracy is one of many systems in the United States that is built around maintaining order by prioritizing the appearance that everything is functioning as it should while actively excluding those in marginalized or oppressed groups who are perceived as disrupting societal order. Meritocracy intersects with other American values, particularly individual freedom and whiteness, to create the illusion that people succeed or fail based on their own individual merit and effort. This essay surveys examples of exclusion in higher education to show that the ideals of meritocracy are frequently abandoned in order to preserve the existing order of the institution.

Racial violence in the academy is enacted upon faculty of color, particularly women, in multiple disciplines. This essay attempts to both expose and suggest that everyday systemic racism has become a pervasive and normalizing feature within disciplines that continue to privilege white and Eurocentric forms of knowledge making while devaluing others. Furthermore, attempts to challenge such supremacies are immediately countered by calls and charges of incivility. This is an essay about the costs of unmasking norms of civility as it bears upon constructions of both whiteness and meritocracy.

Whiteness structures intimacy and belonging in institutional life. In this essay, we unpack how meritocracy relies on exclusionary networks of belonging structured by Whiteness. We argue that meritocracy can be displaced through a recentering of radical intimacy. Critical love and failure are crucial to building coalitions across difference that resist structural violence. We unpack the possibilities of radical intimacy by recalling our embodied experience in co-creating and maintaining our friendship in the context of a Predominantly White Institution.